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Kate understood that, even though it obviously frustrated her.
“When did you get here?” He put his briefcase down on the small worktable in the corner of the windowless cave where Kate worked. The room was large but packed with electronics and computers, some working, some not, all taking up space. Noah would go stir-crazy down here; Kate seemed in her element.
“Seven,” she replied, fixated on the screen in front of her. It was running through numbers and letters at a great speed; she couldn’t possibly be reading anything.
“What are you doing?”
“Breaking Morton’s code. It’s not a complex one; I have a program that will have it soon—it’s only been running for ten minutes. I copied the drive first, so I’m not even working off the original data in case he has a Trojan set up to erase data. But he was never that smart back then. Trask was the brains.”
“Trask?”
“Adam Scott. He went by the name Trask.”
“What about the disks?” Noah asked. “Do you want me to get started on them?”
“I set Hans up next door.”
“Dr. Hans Vigo?”
“Yeah—that’s okay, right? You said you were working with him.”
Noah didn’t have a specific problem. “You could have asked me first.”
“I should have. I’m sorry.” She glanced at him. “Really. But this case—I made a huge mistake six years ago when I was part of the plea agreement. I have to find these answers, for Lucy. I’m not taking over, and I’ll try not to step on your toes, but Hans is one of the few people I know who can view the data on multiple levels—risk assessment of the victims, legal or illegal porn, child endangerment. Plus he knows the players from the years I was tracking Adam Scott and Roger Morton before Paige was killed.”
“I understand.” He sat down in a metal chair next to Kate. “I need to follow up on something today, but I need to know for sure that I can trust you.”
She looked at him. “If you didn’t trust me, why did you let me work the data?”
“Because I heard you were the best.”
Her lips curved up slightly. “True.”
“So I need you, but I also know you have a history with Morton and a relationship with his victim. Whatever you find, I want to know. Everything.”
She nodded, but Noah couldn’t read her blank expression to discern if she would hold to their agreement. “I can tell you from looking at the physical files that he was copying disks manually onto his computer. He had a system that is very straightforward—after he viewed the disk and presumably imported it, he marked it with a code. ‘X’ is straight, soft-core porn. ‘XX’ is straight, hard-core. ‘XXX’ is violent hard-core, possibly nonconsensual. ‘WC’ is webcam, probably hidden webcam or homemade sex tapes. The ‘WC’ is rated by the fetish—up-skirt, hidden videos, et cetera. It’s become all the rage now for teenagers to record themselves having sex and post the tapes on the Internet.” She shook her head. “They really don’t understand what they’re doing with their future.”
She handed Noah a sheet. “Hans wrote that when he got here a few hours ago. It gives us a cheat sheet of priorities.”
“What’s ‘P’ stand for and why is it in red?”
“Anything with a ‘P’ means a minor likely under the age of fourteen is involved. Hans sent those immediately to our child pornography task force. They can run them through their offender database, which will save us a lot of time and give us a better chance to save some of them. However, Morton wasn’t creating these files. He was creatng a clearinghouse of sorts, which makes tracing the evidence to the source next to impossible.”
Very little riled Noah; crimes against children was one of the few things that made him see red. While the FBI and local law enforcement had made great strides in investigating and prosecuting child pornography, the sheer number of cases was staggering. If they couldn’t identify the victim or the offender, there was little they could do except put the images in their database in case they popped up again. Working cybercrimes against children was emotionally the hardest job in the Bureau, hands down, and one of the few squads that agents could transfer out of without difficulty.
Kate said, “I’m not going to do anything stupid, Noah. I understand the trust you’ve placed in me, and believe me that I want to stop whoever Morton was working with as much as you do. The legal way.”
Noah stood. “I hope to be back before long. When Abigail went to the motel yesterday, the part-time clerk was there. Today the manager is back, and he’s the one who checked Morton in. I hope he has more information, but yesterday we got squat.”
Though Lucy’s internship was part-time Monday through Friday, most full-time morgue staff rotated shifts, so she knew nearly everyone who worked there. She always made it a point to talk to everyone, even though her position wasn’t permanent. She found that she could learn far more about a job, the real job, if she befriended people.
She also learned that no one cared about the details of why she wanted to look at files, so when she walked into the intake room to pull the file on Brad Prenter no one questioned her. If someone had, she’d have come up with something plausible—such as making sure she’d filled out forms right. But no one questioned what she did.
The autopsy had been done yesterday afternoon, and she was correct—the body was scheduled for pickup by a local funeral home on Monday morning. Because it was a homicide, all evidence was in the evidence room. Clothing and other contents on Prenter’s body were still in the drying chamber. They had to dry the clothing and then comb it for any trace blood evidence. The articles would be packaged for possible trial.
Crime scene photos and the corpses that surrounded Lucy when she worked at the morgue didn’t bother her, but this was different: in a weird way, she had known Brad Prenter. He’d been out Thursday night because he thought he was meeting her alter ego, Tanya. A chill went through her body, causing the hair at the base of her skull to rise as she opened the file and saw a picture of his body on the autopsy table. A DVD was attached to the file—homicide autopsies were routinely recorded.
She couldn’t view the DVD without breaking the evidence seal, so she put that aside and read the report. Three entry wounds to the abdomen fired from two to four feet away. No exit wounds. Bullets had been sent to the laboratory, standard procedure for ballistics testing. They’d also go to the FBI to add to their database and run against other ballistic reports to determine whether the gun had been used in a previous crime—solved or unsolved.
